It was in the year 2009 when 3 idiots was released, the biggest hit the Indian cinema had seen till that time. Apart from having all the elements of a perfect entertaining flick, there was something else to it which all engineers (leaving aside exceptions) could relate to. That something was the true scenario of engineering colleges in India where the most important thing is to memorize the definitions, theories and all sorts of stuff and just blurt it out on exam day. This rote learning methodology does help the students to land in jobs after completing their degrees but the suffering just starts from there.

The IT companies in India visit colleges and hire fresh graduates in bulk, irrespective of their streams be it electrical, mechanical, biotechnology, etc. The freshers are then put to rigorous and grueling training in basic development languages like C, C++, java, dot net and then they are allocated to real IT projects. Rather than providing a platform to help the freshly trained employees to build on the skills they have acquired, they are assigned tasks like support and testing which do little to help them grow as a developer. This is the story of the bulk of people entering in the IT sector in our country. They finally end up learning nothing about real development and getting stuck in the same jobs, continuing the jobs for they have nowhere else to go as they have not learned anything in real. Then they look up to MBA.

Most of the b-schools must be aware of this truth about the current scenario in the Indian IT sector but still they prefer a forged answer to the most frequently asked question in an interview- “why do you want to do MBA?” The most common and honest answer to this question is “because I don’t want my life to be wasted”. But the interviewer would prefer if the candidate come up with a glossy and made up answer which talks about expanding horizons and knowledge base and more such bedecked lines available on the internet. I believe the reason for a person from IT sector to take control of his life and give it some meaning, which was absent in the IT sector, is a good enough reason to do MBA.

Top B-schools in India have created a reputation of providing education that is more based on heuristic methods of teaching. The industry exposure, platforms to implement skills learned in a classroom in the real world are all characteristics which can be associated to education in B-schools and totally opposed to that in most engineering schools in India. Thus engineers who have missed on the opportunity to gain something called ‘real education’ look up to B-schools to give them this opportunity. Then why the B-schools in India, are not ready to accept this honest straightforward answer. I hope all the prominent B-schools can spare a though to this argument.